Refocusing

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After feedback and rethinking, I’ve returned to the Four Step Clarity of Purpose or Argument document, as suggested by the DS1 instructors. This has become a good process to follow, one I’ll need to remember. Taking time to rewrite and refocus this paper using that four guiding steps was surprisingly challenging. I was guessing it would be simple, since I’d already written ten pages on the topic. The challenge came, not from what I know about this topic, but what I needed to focus on in this paper.

The four steps are:

  1. State the common assumption or problem or issue underlying most research and main argument in this topic
  2. Point out a possible flaw/weakness/gap in this assumption or the main argument of the current research
  3. State the purpose of the article/study that will be a further or deeper, more focused study of the flaw/weakness/gap in the initial assumption or current argument
  4. Outline the significance of purpose for the article/study.

As I was writing a response to these four prompts, I became lost and confused. My paper was not coming together as cleanly as I had hoped. There were lots of ideas and concepts that were confusing the picture. In the end, I’ve removed many of these extraneous ideas and concepts that don’t really fit the purpose of this paper. These were clouding the real purpose of the writing and were getting in the way of clarity. Here is the revised, reduced, and refocused clarity of purpose statement for the paper I’m writing for DS1. This is the result of valuable feedback from classmates who reviewed this paper and conversations with my course instructors.

Step Clarity of Purpose or Argument

There are many conceptions, definitions, and visions for open education in relation to, (a) open education resources (Bayne, Knox, & Ross, 2015; Rolfe, 2011; Weller, 2013; Wiley, Bliss, & McEwan, 2014); (b) open scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012; Stewart, 2015); (c) the open education movement (McAndrew & Farrow, n.d.; Noddings & Enright, 1983); and (d) open pedagogies and practices (Cronin & MacLaren, 2017; Ehlers, 2011a; Nascembeni & Burgos, 2016; Paskevicius, 2017; Stagg, 2017; Veletsianos, 2016). The dominant discourse about open education focuses on open educational resources (Weller, 2011; Jordan & Weller, 2017; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012) and the open education movement (Alevizou, 2015; Bayne, Knox, & Ross, 2015; Veletsianos, 2015).

Dialogue about the transformative potential of open educational practices and pedagogies (OEP) are under-represented in current scholarly work in the field of open education (Cronin, 2017; Cronin & McLaren, 2018; Nascembeni & Burgos, 2016, Paskevicius, 2017). Defining open educational practices in today’s educational spaces is problematic since this term is frequently conflated or used interchangeably with open educational pedagogies (Couros & Hildebrandt, 2016; Cronin, 2017; Cronin & McLaren, 2018; Paskevicius, 2017), while many in the field of higher education equate open education practices to be synonymous with using open textbooks within a course of study (Rolfe, 2011).

Instructors who work toward opening their pedagogical practices (Weller, 2011; Nerantzi, 2018; Ehlers, 2011) struggle to understand, negotiate, and transform their teaching as open educators without a clear understanding of what open educational practices are, whether they are, in fact, opening their educational practice, and why they should aspire to become open educators. What does it mean to be an open educator in my teaching practice? Am I, in any way, an open educator, and if so, how am I open? How can I become an open educator to transform my teaching? Why should I, as an educator in current educational contexts, aspire to practice open education?

This autoethnographic narrative shares a first person perspective of one academic’s lived experiences becoming an open educator/persona in her open educational practice. This story relates the negotiations to create and maintain an online persona (Couros, 2010; Couros and Hildebrandt, 2016; Cronin, 2017), steps taken to become an open educator (Cronin, 2017; Stagg, 2017), and issues with digital literacies, fluencies & citizenship (Couros, 2010; Cronin, 2017; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2016) relevant to shifting educational practices toward the open. This story will be written from a teacher educator context, as well as the open learning contexts in which I participate, in order that preservice teachers, particularly those who are my students, and instructors in tertiary education, can gain insights for their own open educational practices. This can become a mirror or a window (Styles, 1988), to reflect or provide a view of becoming an open educator. This accounting will add to current discourse on the topic of open educational practices and consider, as Paskevicius (2017) states, so “OEP may contribute to the development of valuable literacies for working in the information age” (p. 134).

With this completed, I can now return with intention, to my writing of the final paper. I will remove the ideas and concepts that were confusing the readers, remove the poetic language that clouds the clarity in the writing, and focus on what I need to communicate to a nameless reader who knows nothing about my topic. I’ll ‘word the world’ (Richardson, 2001, p. 35), with my writing about the topic of open educational practices. Next post, upon completion of my paper, … coming soon.

Reference

Richardson, L. (2001). Getting Personal: Writing stories. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14 (1), 33–38.